Conversation Analysis
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 19: 283-307 (Volume publication date October 1990)
Charles Goodwin and John Heritage
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)
I chose to read “Conversation Analysis” in part because I’ve gotten a little behind in my reading and I thought that I would have quick, easily produced comments given that I had bumped into the subject of conversation analysis while reading “Language and Dispute.” I came across an Introduction to Conversation Analysis by Charles Antaki while reading the latter article. The site has a brief description of the field as well as a tutorial with audio and video, sample transcriptions, instructions on making notations, and sample analyses. The site provides a gentle introduction to some of the same names and sources mentioned in the review article and seen on the Wikipedia page on conversation analysis. The site is fun and light and assumes no specific prior knowledge of the field. The review article wasn’t quite so fun and light, but that was to be expected. Reading “Conversation Analysis” I wasn’t particularly drawn toward the quick, easily produced commentary I had in mind (a glossy overview of a specific conversational interaction).
What I most noticed when reading “Conversation Analysis” was that the authors didn’t seem to have the same angst about descriptive vs. theoretical concerns as the author in “The Archaeology of Equality and Inequality.” The data of conversation analysis consists of audio or video recordings of real life interactions, not laboratory productions and the analyses are very descriptive. Conversation analysts seem very comfortable with that type of work being of real value. Goodwin and Heritage write the following:
[Conversation analysis] seeks to describe (my emphasis) the underlying social organization–conceived as an institutionalized substratum of interactional rules, procedures, and conventions–through which orderly and intelligible social interaction is made possible.
I expected to find discussions along the lines of how the length of a pause before an audible response to a question might say something about the nature of the response and that’s what I found:
An initial finding is that different kinds of responsive actions (e.g. agreements/ vs disagreements) are performed in markedly different ways. While agreements are usually performed promptly and in intensified form, disagreements are delayed and mitigated in a variety of ways.
While Goodwin and Heritage did discuss some of the theoretical underpinnings and disciplinary exclusions that gave birth to the field of conversation analysis, they manage to keep that discussion within the limited context of giving background information. That discussion doesn’t take over and shape the whole review.
Why not close on a joke? In similar fashion to the analysis of pause before agreement/disagreement above, Jerry Seinfeld tells a joke describing the relationship between the length of a pause after asking for a favor and the size of the favor:
There’s two types of favors, the big favor and the small favor. You can measure the size of the favor by the pause that a person takes after they ask you to ‘do me a favor.’ Small favor, small pause. Can you do me a favor, hand me that pencil? No pause at all. Big favors are, ‘Could you do me a favor…’ (huge pause, followed by closing credits.) (link)
